Circumcisions and the moral order, the world in danger - Sigismond

From Peaceful Beginnings

(philosophy and basic concepts of the struggle against ISM)

THE LOSS OF YOUR CLITORIS OR FORESKIN DEPRIVED YOU FROM ALL OR PART OF YOUR RIGHT TO PLEASURE, THIS IS NOT A REASON TO DEPRIVE YOUR CHILDREN FROM IT

“It is not worth while saying

That children resemble us,

That they endure the same scars

And that they’re born with violence.

It really suits us to say that,

It helps us to educate them

In our image, our image...”

“This postulate: parents, learning, power,

And underhand dictatorship

That removes them from their initial beauty...”

Morice Bénin

Introduction: a definition of infantile sexual mutilation (ISM) (*)

The preservation of the clitoris and the foreskin is founded on six facts which illustrate the essential-to-life character of these organs. These facts define ISM; an education through violence, infantile sexual mutilation castrates the child from the specific organs of autosexuality, while deeply, and the most often unconsciously, traumatizing the human person. Ritual of appropriation of the individual by the group, it pretends to submit the child and enhance their societal (and sometimes mercantile) “value” by diverting sexuality from pleasure towards reproduction, above all for women. This alleged superiority aims at discriminating the foreigners and opponents.

First fact: infantile. The concept of ISM is not yet very widespread but alone it enables to face the fact that SM is practised by adults upon children. However, historically, Western feminists, who have been at the vanguard of the struggle, have ignored and still ignore infantile mutilation, to speak only of the feminine mutilation. Monopolizing the fight, they make it a contest between both sex adults and accuse the protectors of the child of amalgamating excision and circumcision. But one may not amalgamate violence against adults and violence against children. The war of the sexes is a war of “adults ignoring the child within themselves” (Maud Mannoni) but that of generations is war on children.

Second fact: sexual. SM is not “genital”; it bears upon the specific organs of the foreplay or autosexuality. The clitoris, notably, is the sole human organ intended for pure pleasure, without any secondary function. The matter is not impeding reproduction but lessening, suppressing or turning pleasure into pain (excision). With boys, this emasculation is limited to feminine, preputial pleasure. But with girls, the mutilation of masculine, clitoridian pleasure entails that of feminine, vaginal pleasure, so that the mutilation of pleasure can be total. In most cases, the woman is frequently rendered frigid.

Third fact: physical mutilation. For the 80% of the world population who find pleasure from these organs, the particular and incidentally extreme enjoyment they provide is indisputable, as well for man as for woman. Recent anatomical discoveries bring undeniable founding to this empirical affirmation. Taylor’s one, in 1996, concerns the part of exquisite erogenous mechanism of the ring of the tip of the foreskin. Since that date, it is scientifically demonstrated that the amputation of the masculine feminine organ is genuine SM; the foreskin does not only have the function of protecting erogeneity of the glans but also that of highly erogenous zone. This discovery has not received the medicine Nobel prize and remains ignored, though it has been experimentally confirmed by Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry. At last, the third sexual function of the foreskin – that of a gliding friction-reducer-cushion in coitus – has also been highlighted. It explains why African women whose partners are sexually mutilated are more hit by AIDS. Several statistical enquiries have shown that the circumcision status does not influence the transmission of STDs, but, in the medium term, for AIDS. However, in front of mass circumcision advocated to fight it, one must recall that elementary ethics forbids mutilation for prophylactic motive, very particularly that of children. Nobody has the right to practise circumcision without a serious and established medical motive, upon child as adult.

Fourth fact: the psychic trauma. Highlighted by Freud, traumas bearing on infantile sexuality are at the origin of the formation of the unconscious and thus a deep cause of mental disease. Assaulting the image of the body, the castration of the specific organs of autosexuality has strong emotional repercussions and provokes a serious trauma the most often unconscious. Autosexuality, the very first sexuality, the simplest, most innocent and natural, is gravely made guilty, consciously or not. ISM threatens boys of total castration but even in non circumcising cultures, little girls suffer, unconsciously but much more than boys, from the threat associated with circumcision. Indeed, if one destroys only the lid of the glans with the little brother, what may then happen to a so small and pure enjoyment organ, without any protective or genital function. When insane minds savagely annihilate (excision) or lessen (circumcision) the existence of a pure personal pleasure, the child fall ill and will look for pleasure in sadist and/or masochist perversions, like doing the same to their own children, depression or addictions. In many cases, mental disease is a pathologic reaction to the perversion of parental ethics.

Fifth fact: the taking of possession of the child by the group and imposing the law of the strongest. The human sacrifice of a part of the body is symbolical of appropriation of the individual by the group but it is not only symbolical; it exploits a powerful psychological mechanism of enslavement of the person. Indeed, for the unconscious and fetishist, infantile or primitive soul, the part is equivalent to the whole (cf. the abuses of Voodoo that, after the abolition of sexual mutilation by the enslavers, "possesses" its victims by cutting off a lock of hair, till forcing them to prostitution ). This abuse of power finds pretexts in illusory adult learning and inacceptable possessiveness: “I know, therefore I have the right to determine what shall be done to your body.”

Sixth fact: discrimination. ISM is done in order to award a moral superiority, isolating the ethnic group from others out of artificial racism, and sometimes to favour endogamy. It is also a means of enslavement through exclusion of opponents.

The social function of sexual mutilation is to give the right to wedding through certifying a passage to adulthood accomplished within submission to established order. It is a false certificate. At the contrary, one may fear that, in societies that practise it, rare be those who practically reach adult age, characterized by acknowledgment of the difference of sexes and of the desire of the other, an acquisition that alone enables the access of peoples to democracy. This is why we rise against sexist designations that set up one gender against the other instead of gathering them in defence of the toddler. SM is irreversible. It strikes more particularly three categories of the population: children, bachelors and widowers. As long as the feministo-masculinist speech ignoring the child’s sexuality will prevail, it will not be possible to eradicate ISM.

The agent of ISM: the moral order

The Jewish philosopher Maimonide, the first, in the XIIth century, ascribed to a moral order the responsibility of sexual mutilation. We stand against this falsely moral, societal and religious order which tries to dominate and make use of the child in the name of “black pedagogy” (“Hush, it's for your own sake!”), through terrorist corporal punishment repressing autosexuality: possessory branding, mutilation and torture. Under the guise of folklore and identity or passage rites into so-called adulthood, they have for sole aim to obtain the submission and the alleged moral and physical purity of the child, through a violence and a threat that traumatize them. Being relatively minor, these crimes against humanity (children) are forgivable inasmuch as they rest upon antique customs but on the condition that they will now be stopped.

These barbaric customs are not reserved to Islam, Judaism and a few primitive tribes but also existed in Asia where the Chinese married their daughters more easily through the torture of foot-binding and the Balinese would file short the incisive of young people in order, probably, at the origin at least, not to risk biting during sexual abuse. Circumcision also invaded Anglo-Saxon countries in the 19th century, to move back only in the 20th, and is becoming general in South Korea.

These barbarities are accompanied by verbal repression. The latter operates a mental mutilation, sole present in the rest of humanity. This SM in the general meaning similarly subjects the individual to hypocritical puritanism. Without perhaps being irreversible, mutilation of the minds through speech, Paulinian, Christian and Western, is almost as fearsome as physical excisions. It has the same aim of rendering the individual compliant through traumatizing them by a genuine putting into unconscious terror, founded upon the stupid decree that, without even admitting it, makes autosexuality the original sin. It is fierce and dangerous because it is a both parental and societal lie, difficult to eradicate from minds. The damage provoked by mental repression is as incalculable as that of physical repression.

Against this violence, the transcultural studies of American anthropology (cf. James Prescott, violence.de) have, with absolute statistical correlation, extended the clinical observations of psychoanalysis to entire populations; they affirm that violence is inhibited by pleasure and reciprocally, and that it stems from lack of tenderness in infancy and of the prohibition of premarital sexuality. The discoveries of psychoanalysis, that is to say, on the one hand, the Freudian infantile sexuality and the unconscious, on the other hand, the emphasis upon infantile trauma put forth by Freud and Alice Miller (alice-miller.com) go in the same sense: violence in education, rather than tender care, has catastrophic results: breeding violence, addiction or depression (neurosis, psychosis and perversion).

Biology, anatomy, neuro-anatomy, prophylactic medicine, psychiatry, sexology, ethics, law, sociology, ethnology, history of cultures and religions, and psychoanalysis, human sciences are unanimous in standing up for organs sometimes alleged to be redundant but actually destroyed because they are the specific organs of a taboo practice: autosexuality.

ISM: the height of repression of infantile sexuality

More than a century ago, Freud already made himself the spokesman of infantile sexuality, including natural exhibitionism and voyeurism. By verifying its existence (manusexuality and auto-fellatio) right up inside the womb, prenatal ultrasonography today brings him strong backing. However, autosexuality is still repressed in one way or another.

Indeed, imagine a being that has freely practised autosexuality in its mother’s womb. You are this being. Now imagine that once out of this Eden, while quietly being bathed, you are suddenly glowered at and harshly told: “Why is it so? You touched it?” Or else you realize that, insidiously, hypocritically, everybody around you not only condemns nudity but also disparages your act of self love by wording it through pejorative and reproachful terms. The root (manus stupratio) of the most common one denounces disturbance – as in per-turbation – and turpitude. “Autosexuality” must replace the execrable term, invented by religious, made guilty and allegedly chaste bachelors but at times revealing themselves paedophiles, which must be crossed out of the vocabulary. This is a compulsory step in the fight against sexual violence and crime (including ISM).

Repression of the – very lightly said – infantile sexuality stems from this universal taboo. Children and young people emotionally perceive the repression of sexuality as a death threat through loss of love and thus abandonment. Outlawing pleasure, contrary to the natural law, such a threat can only oppose the happy resolution of the Oedipus complex that implies adherence to law. So is it likely to block children or adolescents in their growth. Perversions – notably paedophilia, the twin sister of homophilia – and rape are the direct consequence – aggravated by the sexual fuss of the media – of the hypocritical public reprobation of what everybody gaily practises in private. Only seducers, rapists, paedophiles and homophiles “masturbate”, in their victims, granting them the same contempt they endured in their autosexuality of childhood. They will no longer need this when autosexuality will be universally acknowledged.

The height of this repression (**), ISM generates particularly high violence. It does not welcome the child in a society regulated by the difference of sex and age but enlists them in warlike gangs through barbarous and military initiation. Of the ten genocides of modern times, only one did not imply sexually mutilated on one side or the other, the frequency of wars is three to four times greater in circumcising countries, the death penalty twice more frequent and they (half of them) are the only ones to excise girls. In Norway, 60% of the rapes are committed by 2% of the population who are circumcised and one may wonder whether the other rapists would not have suffered a forced retraction of the foreskin. SM is the breeding ground of sexism, paranoia, fanaticism and group or state terrorism.

Discrimination through ISM

1) The assault on the respect of the human person and species

Distinctive physical signs hurt human dignity in a way typical of the moral order: a violation of intimacy. Marking the body makes it an advertising poster and Moses and Mohammed forbade tattoos because it must not be treated like a commodity. Pulling down the trousers of the child in order to mutilate them humiliates them.

Then, physical marking attacks the human species. Founding one people’s identity upon an assault against the identity of the species is not only degrading, it is also discriminatory since it leads to illusorily believe oneself superior or even boast about it. No people may carve out for themselves a purely formal identity upon the body of their children without offending the rest of humanity. A collective identity founded upon a mutilation is an identity of collective alienation through auto-exclusion.

2) A double exclusion: discrimination of the individual and other ethnic groups

The African saying: “An uncircumcised is not a man!” implies that the absence of mutilation entails casting out by the ethnic group. This systematic accessory of SM reveals its deep meaning of measure of exclusion, of barrier to marrying outside the group through dissuading the youths from mixing up with those of neighbouring groups, one of the main concerns of the racists.

Intended to separate the group from others, SM is a sectarian act, sometimes committed under the guise of religion and alleged bringing a moral, and even sexual superiority. But exclusion calls for hatred. Some great thinkers (Spinoza, Freud) denounced circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples. SM is encouraged by tyrannical regimes that use it as initiation for their troops and sign of tribal distinction. It has the most often a sexist character. Taking for alibi the festivities of folklore, this incitement to discrimination is imposed by militaro-religious elites. The community sign is always a call for nationalism and a sign of war. Tattoos, veils, burkas, scarifications, cut off clitoris and foreskins, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, stretched vulvar labias, forced obesity, the death penalty, to arms et cetera, the escalation of the very ethnic techniques of manipulation of the minds through mutilation of the bodies channels human needs at the service of the interests of the dominating classes. It tries to set up sexuality from pleasure for the sake of reproduction. Antisexual and antidemocratic since intending to create allegedly pure and superior to other beings, sexual mutilation discriminates the neighbouring groups and those of the group itself who refuse it. More fascist than fascism, it is unbearable by fascists themselves; this is not a reason for democrats to tolerate it.

Conclusion

“Everything always has to be done again.” Raoul Dugay

Everything happens as if certain societies, facing the absence of biological sign of passage to adult age, made some out of nothing, in order to boast about it. These societies seem ignoring that man is only an aging child and that the one who is unable to regress is also unable to progress and locks himself up into obscurantism. Sexual mutilation is not racist; it is an artificial racism, more racist than racism, that “makes supermen” (Dr Wluczka). Sexual mutilation is the tool of a particularly efficient tyranny. Founded upon perversion of ethics distorted into moralizing morality, it pretends giving lessons to the people for the sole sake of the cruelty of these who exploit them. It creates neurosis inside the people in order to give a social basis to the neurosis of the rulers. The abolition of this crime against humanity is only a stage in the fight against the repression of the sexuality of the youths and for the right of the human person to the free access to their own body and to the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity.

Sigismond (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux), HEC, Lic. Sc. Éco., DECS. oldsigismund@hotmail.com

(*) The expression “infantile sexual mutilation” is recent. It can be found, implicitly, in the name of the French Association against the mutilation of children (1989), it appears in the doctorate thesis of Maître Caroline Gonzalès (http://enfant.ovh.org/circ.pdf), on the cover of a book by Doctor Gérard Zwang (History of sex sorrows, 1994), then on Internet in 2006 (http://www.bodieslikeours.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-1805.html), without its novelty and specificity should ever be underlined.

(**) ISM is particularly harmful in the case of infants (Anglo-Saxon countries, South Korea, or-thodox Judaism) where circumcision, perpetrated before the age of speech, cannot be verbal-ized, which impedes the substitution of society for the mother and renders the emotional shock still more horrible. The best observers of infancy strongly recommend birth within gen-tleness (Leboyer), breast-feeding till the age of speech and holding till that of walking. We are poles apart of the savage ordeals of separation from the mother.

Revised and without cut for lack of time version of the lecture pronounced 4th September 2008 in the University of Keele (U.-K.), at the 10th international symposium of NOCIRC, organized by NOCIRC, NORM-UK and the University of Keele school of law.